Chapter Chapter 45 · Chapter III

After dinner the next day I said good-bye and drove back to Hastings to

take the train for Black Hawk. Ántonia and her children gathered round

my buggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me

with friendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate.

When I reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group was

still there by the windmill. Ántonia was waving her apron.

At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on the

wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture.

‘That’s like him,’ his brother said with a shrug. ‘He’s a crazy kid.

Maybe he’s sorry to have you go, and maybe he’s jealous. He’s jealous

of anybody mother makes a fuss over, even the priest.’

I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine

head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat,

the wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.

‘Don’t forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up on the

Niobrara next summer,’ I said. ‘Your father’s agreed to let you off

after harvest.’

He smiled. ‘I won’t likely forget. I’ve never had such a nice thing

offered to me before. I don’t know what makes you so nice to us boys,’

he added, blushing.

‘Oh, yes, you do!’ I said, gathering up my reins.

He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed

pleasure and affection as I drove away.

My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were

dead or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were

playing in the Harlings’ big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had

been cut down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy

poplar that used to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the

morning I spent with Anton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in

the yard behind his saloon. While I was having my midday dinner at the

hotel, I met one of the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he

took me up to his office and talked over the Cutter case with me. After

that, I scarcely knew how to put in the time until the night express

was due.

I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the

land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red

grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out

there I felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable

blue of autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I

could see the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me,

and all about stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold colour, I

remembered so well. Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands

and piling against the wire fences like barricades. Along the

cattle-paths the plumes of goldenrod were already fading into

sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it. I had escaped from the

curious depression that hangs over little towns, and my mind was full

of pleasant things; trips I meant to take with the Cuzak boys, in the

Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water. There were enough Cuzaks to

play with for a long while yet. Even after the boys grew up, there

would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along a few miles of

lighted streets with Cuzak.

As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble

upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north

country; to my grandfather’s farm, then on to the Shimerdas’ and to the

Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when

the highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture

fence was all that was left of that old road which used to run like a

wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and

circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds.

On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared—were mere shadings

in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever

the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The rains had made

channels of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deeply that the sod had

never healed over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly’s

claws, on the slopes where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the

hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of

the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the

slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we

got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw,

wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to

close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be

again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that

night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand.

I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what

a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had

been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of

fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I

understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever

we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable

past.